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Bezig met laden... Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Songdoor Judith Tick
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Tick is a professor emerita of music history at Northeastern University... She chronicles the slights and insults Fitzgerald faced as a Black woman on tour, especially in the South. During the civil rights era, some wished Fitzgerald had been more outspoken. She felt she spoke more clearly through her work... Many listeners, then and now, find Fitzgerald’s recordings to be aloof and impersonal. In her introduction to a 2016 book on Billie Holiday, Zadie Smith, channeling Holiday, writes: “All respect to Ella, all respect to Sarah, but when those gals open their mouths to sing, well, to you it’s like someone just opened a brand-new Frigidaire. A chill comes over you.”...Tick’s book warms again as she approaches the end of Fitzgerald’s life, in 1996. When she was in failing health, she liked to listen to her old records and try to remember everything. On one of her last days, her son hired a trio of excellent musicians to play for her. They were downstairs, she was upstairs, and the beautiful sound traveled up to find her. Tick (Ruth Crawford Seeger), a professor emerita of music history at Northeastern University, delivers a magisterial biography of singer Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996), who “fearlessly explored... different styles of American song through the lens of African American jazz.” .... Drawing on archival research and animated by genuine passion for her subject, Tick paints a detailed portrait of an artist whose willingness to reinvent herself galvanized her career. It’s rendered in luxuriant prose that brings Fitzgerald’s “glass-shattering high notes” and “lustrous beguiling voice” to life. The result is an excellent addition to the shelf on America’s jazz legends. Comprehensive and fascinating biography of an American music titan.... The author’s music-history chops are on full display in her consistently intriguing analyses of how and why particular songs and lyrics ("The Object of My Affection," "Goodnight My Love," and "Mack the Knife" for example) worked for Fitzgerald musically and culturally; her significance in the world of bebop; early performances in such venues as the Apollo Theater and the Savoy Ballroom; and her radio, stage, and recording career with bandleaders like Chick Webb. Tick excels at describing the stark contrast between Fitzgerald's onstage presence and her offstage shyness; passages on Fitzgerald's relationship with the Decca and Verve labels and her collaborations with arrangers such as Nelson Riddle are equally valuable....Essential for casual fans of jazz and music history and Fitzgerald aficionados alike, this thoroughly impressive work will be hard to equal. As masterful and wonderful as its subject. Incisive, doggedly researched ... Tick...proves an ideal guide to Fitzgerald’s perpetual progress ... With few survivors of Fitzgerald’s era left to interview, Tick makes vigorous use of press coverage, yielding particularly fruitful results from Black newspapers and periodicals that covered seemingly every move the singer made ... This is a book that clearly took a long time to research and write; its insights are deeply ingrained, its observations carefully rendered rather than overstated ... Vivid. OnderscheidingenErelijsten
An NPR 2023 "Books We Love" Pick * A Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 A landmark biography that reclaims Ella Fitzgerald as a major American artist and modernist innovator. Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) possessed one of the twentieth century's most astonishing voices. In this first major biography since Fitzgerald's death, historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational artist. Becoming Ella Fitzgerald clears up long-enduring mysteries. Archival research and in-depth family interviews shed new light on the singer's difficult childhood in Yonkers, New York, the tragic death of her mother, and the year she spent in a girls' reformatory school--where she sang in its renowned choir and dreamed of being a dancer. Rarely seen profiles from the Black press offer precious glimpses of Fitzgerald's tense experiences of racial discrimination and her struggles with constricting models of Black and white femininity at midcentury. Tick's compelling narrative depicts Fitzgerald's complicated career in fresh and original detail, upending the traditional view that segregates vocal jazz from the genre's mainstream. As she navigated the shifting tides between jazz and pop, she used her originality to pioneer modernist vocal jazz. Interpreting long-lost setlists, reviews from both white and Black newspapers, and newly released footage and recordings, the book explores how Ella's transcendence as an improvisor produced onstage performances every bit as significant as her historic recorded oeuvre. From the singer's first performance at the Apollo Theatre's famous "Amateur Night" to the Savoy Ballroom, where Fitzgerald broke through with Chick Webb's big band in the 1930s, Tick evokes the jazz world in riveting detail. She describes how Ella helped shape the bebop movement in the 1940s, as she joined Dizzy Gillespie and her then-husband, Ray Brown, in the world-touring Jazz at the Philharmonic, one of the first moments of high-culture acceptance for the disreputable art form. Breaking ground as a female bandleader, Fitzgerald refuted expectations of musical Blackness, deftly balancing artistic ambition and market expectations. Her legendary exploration of the Great American Songbook in the 1950s fused a Black vocal aesthetic and jazz improvisation to revolutionize the popular repertoire. This hybridity often confounded critics, yet throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Ella reached audiences around the world, electrifying concert halls, and sold millions of records. A masterful biography, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald describes a powerful woman who set a standard for American excellence nearly unmatched in the twentieth century. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)782.42165092The arts Music Vocal music Secular Forms of vocal music Secular songs General principles and musical forms Song genres Jazz songsLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: Geen beoordelingen.Ben jij dit?Word een LibraryThing Auteur. |